The stock market is not a retirement production machine.
You can’t simply plug your money into one end and assume that a gold-plated pension spits out the other end a few years later.
And yet, this is precisely what many modern retirement plans assume. All you need to do is buy stocks and let mantras like “stocks go up in the long run” do all the work for you. Then the retirement you hope for will thereby be paid for, as if by magic…
Of course, this is just the third version of the same illusion – that funding your retirement is easy if you just trust the elites and the establishment and do things their way.
The first version of this illusion was the state pension. Pay your taxes and the government will take care of you in your old age. But it turns out there just aren’t enough young taxpayers to deliver on that promise. Oops.
So pension ages are rising, pension payments aren’t sufficient to retire on and politicians moved on to a different promise instead.
